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I think we should track down Atwood, shake him upside-down then buy SO with whatever lunch money falls out of him.
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XMLbogNov 30 '09 at 16:34

@Gargamel: Can't we just cut out the middle man and shake him upside-down until SO falls out?
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Hilarious Comedy PestoNov 30 '09 at 16:47

3

@Pesto: SO is software, man. He keeps that on a set of 54 floppies in his desk. No one can carry around that many floppies.
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XMLbogNov 30 '09 at 16:50

@Gargamel: What if he has a backpack? Or a large fanny pack? Or he's pushing a shopping cart?
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Hilarious Comedy PestoNov 30 '09 at 17:15

11

Backpacks and fanny packs have zippers, and so shaking him upside-down won't cause SO to fall out. Likewise, a shopping cart is not attached to Atwood, and so flipping him upside-down will not upturn the cart. What we could do is glue his hands to the shopping cart before inverting his orientation and agitating him.
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XMLbogNov 30 '09 at 17:31

3

You're assuming that he keeps his backpacks and fanny packs properly zipped, a point I'm not willing to concede without evidence. Even if that is the case, we simply need to shake him vigorously enough to cause the zipper to open. And as to the shopping cart, perhaps I assumed too much, but I took it for granted that we would permanently attach his hands to said cart prior to inversion. My mistake for not clarifying that, I suppose.
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Hilarious Comedy PestoNov 30 '09 at 17:37

2

I would pay extra to keep silly questions about site worth out of here.
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George StockerNov 30 '09 at 17:41

Where did he get the shopping cart, backpack and fanny pack? If he got them at Wal-Mart, then the cart's handle will be covered in sticky juice residue and the packs' zippers will fail at the slightest hint of internal pressure. But if he got them from, say, Kool-Aid mail-in points, then we are well and truly welbogged. Those things are impenetrable zippered fortresses and the Kool-Aid shopping cart has rocket booster on the back; we'd never catch Atwood on one of those things.
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XMLbogNov 30 '09 at 17:45

@Gargamel: The Kool-Aid points program has been discontinued, so we're probably in the clear. Unless, of course, Jeff knows the Kool-Aid Man personally, in which case we are ubersmurfed. No wall can protect you from the Kool-Aid Man. He will forever quench our thirst, holding our heads beneath the churning amethyst waves of a sea of Purplesaurus Rex, until at last we cease to struggle. When we surface again, we shall be no more than soulless revenants shuffling across the Earth in search of the thirsty, that they too may know the quenching of undeath. Jeff, as a vampire, is naturally immune.
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Hilarious Comedy PestoNov 30 '09 at 18:39

@Pesto: What if we just give the Kool-Aid man like $5 to punch Jeff in the gut?
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XMLbogNov 30 '09 at 18:45

12 Answers
12

Good question! How big a problem is SO, and how can we convince the industry at large to buy out Jeff et. al. before all of our productivity is sucked away? Perhaps we should multiply the average time a user spends on SO by the average IT person's salary and the number of users.

For illustrative purposes, if we're conservative and we say there are:

10,000 regular users

Averaging 5 hours a week on SO

Paid an average US$25/hr

That's US$1,250,000 per week. Therefore, SO has cost US$65 million in lost productivity in the past year alone. It must be worth that much to close it down, for all our sakes, before it's too late!

Superuser is worth $119! That's almost as much as Stack Overflow! We have to stop it!
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XMLbogNov 30 '09 at 16:31

5

Right on! Meta is worth $119! I always knew this website was worth something.
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TroggyNov 30 '09 at 16:37

6

codinghorror.com is worth $127. joelonsoftware.com? $136! If J&J sold all their sites maybe they'd have enough for a pony. (Gawds, this is a funny site.)
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Stu ThompsonNov 30 '09 at 16:54

3

I tried to find out how much websitevaluecalculator.com was worth using websitevaluecalculator.com and it exploded!
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innaMNov 30 '09 at 17:13

Good Lord, man -- according to these yo-yos, my site (with 2 pages, lazily built in iWeb because I shut down my blog and didn't want to bother) is worth $95 -- 2/3 the value of SO?
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John RudyNov 30 '09 at 19:24

Rats. I thought we had a way to get rid of the US national debt, but house.gov and senate.gov are only worth $152. whitehouse.gov is better at $188,769 but still not enough.
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tvanfossonNov 30 '09 at 19:42

@tinkertim, I saw that too. And I laughed. Then I checked it out, and apparently, websitevaluecalculator.com is worth $33,042
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EwanNov 30 '09 at 19:43

@Ewan: No kidding? When I did it, it was $27K. Nice to be able to increase in value so quickly!
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John RudyNov 30 '09 at 19:45

3

I think all the linking to it here has driven up it's value
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PhoshiNov 30 '09 at 20:05

I'm not sure what it's actually worth, but it's very likely Google will buy it for a few billion dollars, give it away for free, and somehow get even richer by doing it. Those guys are evil wizards, I tell you!